[RASMB] question power failure XL-A

[pjgb at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk]

Dear Joris,

We have certainly experienced PWR diagnostics on our XLA, particularly in 
thundery weather when there may well have been power disruptions/surges on 
the line voltage.  Usually they were accompanied by the PC controller 
crashing as well.
However, in our case the power to the analytical has always recovered fast 
enough for it to continue running - as it is designed to do.  As long as 
the rotor speed does not drop below the acceptable phase lag, the 
centrifuge should be able to recover, since it remembers the last run 
conditions and attempts to resume these.  It is the PC which is typically 
much more sensitive.

Your description of the fault does raise the question whether the power 
failure was for several seconds - in which case you would expect to find 
much else in the lab had also crashed - or else the memory funtion on your 
XLA is faulty.

I hope this experience helps,
Yours,

Jo

--On Friday, August 13, 2004 9:05 am +0200 "Beld, Joris" 
<beld at org.chem.ethz.ch> wrote:

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> Dear all,
>
> Sorry to bother you all with this but we have a rather strange problem
> with our XL-A and I was wondering whether this is common or something
> specific for our machine/setup. (and I cannot find any information online)
>
> In the past two months (the XL-A was running continuously) it happened
> four times that during the night the XL-A crashed (only rotation; vacuum
> was still okay) due to a 'power failure'. Interesting is that in all four
> cases the weather turned from very nice summer weather to showers and
> thunderstorms overnight. I know this seems to be a strange correlation
> but I cannot think of another reason. My question is: is this normal for
> an XL-A? The following question is of course how to solve this? I already
> thought on putting a permanent oscilloscope on the power input to log the
> current (and another idea was to use a UPS between the power connector
> and the XL-A, but do these exist for high power connections?) but that is
> not so easy with the high power connection the XL-A uses. Anyone a good
> idea how to check my hypothesis and how to fix it? Any help welcome!
>
> Kind regards,
>
>
> Joris Beld
>
> --
> Joris Beld
> Laboratory of Organic Chemistry
> ETH-Hönggerberg
> HCI-F322
> CH-8093 Zürich
> Switzerland
> + 41 1 6322972
> beld at org.chem.ethz.ch
> http://www.protein.ethz.ch
> --
>
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P.J.G. Butler,
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH, UK.
Tel. +44 (0)1223 402296